Central NHS Services

The Client

A large public sector organisation employing over 3000 staff and providing a wide range of services to the NHS including a Shared Service Centre (incorporating Finance, HR, ICT and Facilities).

The Challenge

With increasing customer focus on the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of services provided by the organisation, and the increasing reliance of customers on the shared service centre, management had identified the need to revisit their business continuity plans, including assurance that customer recovery time requirements were met.

Management had identified the Finance Shared service centre as a priority for two main reasons:

The significant sums of money handled on a monthly basis and the absolute dependence of the recipients of these funds on the reliability of the payments process

The critical dependencies to outsourced suppliers of ICT including financial ledgers and payment processing systems

The Solution

Teed’s consultants proposed that it would be critical to directly involve key customers in the first phase of the solution to ensure that requirements were clearly understood and customer buy-in was obtained to any proposed business continuity strategies and plans.

Teed’s previous experience of working with a significant number of those customers helped to facilitate a coordinated process involving a series of workshops with internal and external customers and the key provider representatives.

Teed’s consultants also had intimate knowledge of the marketplace of both the customer and provider organisations and were able to identify and highlight areas of weakness that would require special attention at the same time recognising where manual workarounds and pooling of resources could be used to provide cost effective mitigation to a range of potential incidents.

Teed developed comprehensive recovery strategies and a business continuity plan which helped the organisation identify and then close the gaps between required and achievable recovery times in many areas of the operation.

The Result

The client organisation was able to satisfy external and internal customers that they had robust business continuity plans in place.

The direct involvement of the primary third party provider of outsourced ICT systems and services in workshop sessions subsequently led to Teed facilitating a joint tabletop exercise which involved participants from the client, the key supplier and observers from several customer organisations to help validate the plans and the recovery strategies.

This then resulted in customers obtaining a high level of assurance that the organisation would keep disruption within acceptable levels in the event of an incident.